Hey, it’s me, Sarah. And this is Note to Self, a newsletter where I unpack whatever’s been in my notes app, tweet drafts, or group chat lately. Today, it’s a love letter to summer and maybe to my inner child.
“and when it is August, you can have it August, and abundantly so.”
This is my favorite line from my favorite poem, “You Can’t Have It All,” by Barbara Ras.
When I was a kid, summer seemed to stretch out in front of me like a long hot sheet of asphalt, with heat waves hazing the horizon so that I could never see the end. Of course, August always came, and abundantly so.
Those early summers, before I was old enough to drive or work, when I was landlocked in my suburban cul-de-sac, my mom used to beg me to write. She was always buying me new journals, hoping that if she picked one cute enough, I would use it. I was very shy and sensitive and she was trying to give me an outlet. Mostly though, I refused. “I have nothing to write about!” I would whine to her. And yet here I am as an adult, writing about my supposedly eventless childhood.
The summers that felt unnoteworthy then, I remember now like an idyllic movie montage. Dragging sleeping bags onto my best friend’s trampoline, whispering secrets, and making the springs creak with every hushed fit of giggles. Playing with Barbies until we were too old, giving them whirlwind romances with the chiseled action figures I’d steal from my brother’s room. Riding my bike in lazy loops around the neighborhood and making sure to catch each sprinkler’s splash.
One particularly rainy summer, more teen than child, I spent long afternoons giving myself elaborate pedicures. I’d lay on my bedroom floor listening to the radio and daydreaming about what it would be like to live in a love song with whichever pre-pubescent boy I was secretly enamored with.
Perhaps because I was so shy and sensitive, I was a fervent daydreamer, often retreating into an alternate inner world; one where I was older, more outgoing, and where I had curly hair instead of stick-straight. In my daydreams, the boys I never spoke to in real life returned my crushes. My friendships were deeper, closer, and filled with adventures, like in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. In the future, I imagined that I would live alone in a big house and spend my days traipsing around in pretty dresses. If I ever needed anything, I reasoned, I would just call a handyman, which seemed very glamorous to me.
To remember these daydreams now fills me with a bittersweet tenderness for my girlhood. Those summers were so lush and free and sunny. And yet, I was swept away with longing for the future, escaping into my imagination at every opportunity, just to dream of such practical adult realities.
Summer was, to me, a season of longing. Because in those three magical months, the rules of time and responsible sugar consumption were briefly suspended, and anything could happen. Adults became pleasantly lazy and more fun. The days stretched miraculously longer and blurred together. Rules were amended — it was in the summer that I was first allowed to shave my legs, watch a PG-13 movie, and go to parties with boys. And then, when the summer timewarp was complete, we’d be dumped into school with unrecognizable new bodies: longer limbs, creaking voices, braces, training bras. Ah, the magic of summer. Of course, most of the magic was just a function of getting older, but it didn’t feel that pedestrian or expected at the time. It felt like the lightning strike of pure possibility. Everything could change at a moment’s notice, and I couldn’t stop myself from wishing that it would.
Even as an adult, I feel a haze of longing hanging over the summer months, which brings me to this summer: my unplanned summer of adult girlhood. A work contract fell apart at the end of May and I decided to take the month of June off. Then, somehow, it was July 31st! I’m lucky that I can take this much time off, I tell my friends. They ask me if I have plans to work again and I shrug. It’s slow this summer. It’s just the nature of freelance work, I say. And all of that’s true, but mostly, I was just swept away by summer’s sweet tide.
I am happy to report that a summer, left unhurried, will return to the shape of our youth, which is to say: it will lose its shape entirely. As the days got longer and ran together, I found myself returning to familiar shapes, too. I whispered secrets and giggled with my girlfriends in shared airbnb beds. I started riding a bike again, which fills me with a childlike giddiness I have to actively suppress, lest I smile at passersby like an idiot. I got dressed up to see the Barbie movie and cried the whole way through. How ironic that I spent the summers of my girlhood fantasizing about the future, and yet here I am in that future, recreating the simple joys of the past. How perfect, really.
There’s been boredom, too. I clipped through every administrative life task on my list and even gave my walls a fresh coat of white paint. I forgot what day it was, stayed up late, and slept in later. Eventually, I found myself laying on my rug, listening to love songs and daydreaming again.
At 30, however, daydreaming has lost some of its appeal. There’s something pernicious about longing. I was too young to name it back then, but now I know that a life of longing is one of quiet dissatisfaction. Always looking forward, always wishing for more. So much of life slips through our fingers before we realize that we can’t have it back, that we can’t have it all. How much of my girlhood slipped away while I was longing for the inevitabilities of adulthood?
And now I am an adult. Ostensibly, I am the adult I once dreamed of becoming. I live alone. I have been known to traipse about in a pretty dress. Famously, I have called a handyman. And, though I am loathe to use Hinge’s favorite word — “aDvEnTuRe” — in earnest, I have had a few. What else did I long for as a child? To be deeply loved by people other than my family, like friends and perhaps a human version of a chiseled action figure. To be brave and outgoing. To have curly hair.
Some things change and some things don’t. I get up every morning and curl my hair, though the humidity flattens it within hours. Recently, a friend laughed in my face when I called myself “shy.” And though my crushes, to my knowledge, remain unreturned, I have plenty of people to love deeply.
I realize that I am so lucky. In fact, I’ve taken to announcing my luck, out loud and often. We are so lucky, I shout over the wind, in a convertible with my best friend. I am having the time of my life, I laugh, jumping over a wave at the beach. This is the stuff of life, I say, popping the cork out of a bottle of rosé. I’m doing this on purpose, trying to shake off the malaise of longing. I’ve spent so long longing, but I have enough now. I want it to be enough.
This time around, I’m writing it all down, too. I’m trying to make the pleasure of life more permanent, holding it in my hands while I search for the right words to remember it by. Like the sheer frivolity of leaving the house without a jacket and walking to the grocery store at 10 pm for a single can of rootbeer. Or the sensory feast of peeling off a swimsuit under the lukewarm spray of a shower, watching sand and salt run off my body, marveling at the quickness of tan lines. This is it, I think. Life is happening in these moments.
Here’s another moment: One night a few weeks ago, after dinner with friends, I stood in front of my apartment and looked up at the black locust tree that hangs just below my front window. I wasn’t ready to go inside, so I kept walking to the park on my block. I beelined for the swing set and kicked off my heels. There was a couple sharing a joint on the other side of the play structure, and a few glowing windows in the apartments facing the park. But it was quiet, late, and the world felt like mine for a moment. I settled into a seat, noticing how the chains dug into my adult hips. Even though it was after midnight, it was still hot and humid and the swinging motion had the strange dual effect of turning down the heat on my skin and turning up the wine in my bloodstream. I watched my pretty white dress fill with rushing wind and then I leaned back and let all the blood rush to my head as the world flipped over.
When I sat back up on the swing, careening forward toward the moon, there was a fullness in my chest. A buoyant sort of pressure, like when you take a big gulp of air before diving under a crashing wave. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. It swells behind my sternum and reaches up to my collarbones. I feel it in my throat and then behind my eyes, invariably shining with tears.
I think it’s my heart, recognizing all the little dreams I buried there in the summers of my girlhood. My sweet, simple inner world, come true and spilled out in front of me. I imagine her swinging next to me, that gangly girl with full eyebrows and teeth too big for her face. There’s nothing left to long for, I’d say. It’s time to let go. We’ll never have curly hair, but we can have it August, and abundantly so.
xx,
Sarah
♥️